We use the largest common factor in 14 items reported in the World Values Surveys as a robust measure of religiosity. This measure is held to identify the importance of religion in all aspects of people's life. The level of religiosity differs by about 50 percentage points between rich and poor...

The agricultural transition, the demographic transition and the democratic transition explain the development paths of the share of agriculture, the population growth rate, and the standard democracy indices. We demonstrate that two related estimation models give contradictory results when...

This article considers the transformation of the political system as countries pass through the Grand Transition from being a poor developing country to a wealthy developed country. In the process, most countries change from an authoritarian to a democratic political system, as measured by the...

Religiosity is defined as the importance of religion in all aspects of life. The definition is operationalized into a robust measure by aggregating 14 items from the World Values Surveys. Religiosity falls by 50 % when countries pass through the transition from being underdeveloped to becoming...

Prehistoric measures of biogeography are used as instruments for modern income levels. We find that our instrumented incomes explain the cross-country pattern of corruption just as well as actual incomes, so the long-run causality appears to be entirely from income to corruption.

We consider the empirical relevance of two opposing hypotheses on the causality between income and democracy: The Democratic Transition hypothesis claims that rising incomes cause a transition to democracy, whereas the Critical Junctures hypothesis denies this causal relation. Our empirical...

The Grand Transition (GT) view claims that economic development is causal to institutional development, and that many institutional changes can be understood as transitions occurring at roughly the same level (zone) of development. The Primacy of Institutions (PoI) view claims that economic...

The Grand Transition (GT) view claims that economic development is causal to institutional development, and that many institutional changes can be understood as transitions occurring at roughly the same level (zones) of development. The Primacy of Institutions (PoI) view claims that economic...

The paper considers the transformation of the political system as countries pass through the Grand Transition from a poor developing country to a wealthy developed country. In the process most countries change from an authoritarian to a democratic political system. This is shown by using the...